An Analysis of Poverty Convergence: Evidence from Pennsylvania Counties

This paper extends applications of unconditional and conditional β-convergence and σ-convergence analysis to poverty rates in a panel data sample of Pennsylvania counties during the period 1990-2019. Spatial structural breaks between rural and urban counties in Pennsylvania plus the possibility that Philadelphia County is an outlier are acknowledged to avoid spurious inferences. The findings support the existence of unconditional β-convergence in the pooled, urban, and rural samples with non-metropolitan areas exhibiting the greatest convergence. However, the largest conditional β-convergence is observed for urban counties, and this outcome is robust to the exclusion of Philadelphia County. Graphical evidence evinces a greater degree of σ-divergence in rural areas relative to the pooled and urban samples with metropolitan areas exhibiting neither convergence nor divergence in the absence of Philadelphia County. Statistical evidence based on ADF and DF-GLS tests reveals the presence of σ-divergence in the pooled and rural samples but weaker findings for the urban counties. Panel data tests for unit roots indicate σ-convergence for the full and rural samples but mixed results for the urban sample depending upon the test employed and whether Philadelphia County is included or not. The findings indicate that further investigation of tailored policy responses to poverty in different geographic areas within the same state is warranted

Delinquency and Crime Prevention: Overview of Research Comparing Treatment Foster Care and Group Care

Background: Evidence of treatment foster care (TFC) and group care’s (GC) potential to prevent delinquency and crime has been developing. Objectives: We clarified the state of comparative knowledge with a historical overview. Then we explored the hypothesis that smaller, probably better resourced group homes with smaller staff/resident ratios have greater impacts than larger homes with a meta-analytic update. Methods: Research literatures were searched to 2015. Five systematic reviews were selected that included seven independent studies that compared delinquency or crime outcomes among youths ages 10–18. A similar search augmented by author and bibliographic searches identified six additional studies with an updated meta-analysis. Discrete effects were analyzed with sample-weighted preventive fractions (PF) and 95 % confidence intervals (CI). Results: Compared with GC, TFC was estimated to prevent nearly half of delinquent or criminal acts over 1–3 years (PF = 0.56, 95 % CI 0.50, 0.64). Two pooled study outcomes tentatively suggested that GC in homes with less than ten youths may prevent delinquency and crime better than TFC, p = 0.08. Study designs were non-equivalent or randomized trials that were typically too small to ensure controlled comparisons. Conclusions: These synthetic findings are best thought of as preliminary hypotheses. Confident knowledge will require their testing with large, perhaps multisite, controlled trials. Such a research agenda will undoubtedly be quite expensive, but it holds the promise of knowledge dividends that could prevention much suffering among youths, their families and society

Helping At Risk Women Transition Back Home

An expanding movement within higher education has attempted to make universities more relevant and responsive to the communities and states in which they are located, utilizing community-based partnerships to enhance student service learning opportunities and strengthen their own communities. These partnerships provide a mechanism by which underserved populations might receive more attention. This article documents Eastern Kentucky University’s partnership with a community-based agency that serves low-income individuals and families in central Kentucky counties to improve the lives and confidence of women involved with the criminal justice system by offering them coping skills, tools and resources that will help them to view themselves as valued members of the community

Spectrofluorometric characteristics of fluorescent dissolved organic matter in a surface microlayer in the Southern Baltic coastal waters

This paper presents results of characterization of Dissolved Organic Matter (DOM) using fluorescence spectroscopy in the surface microlayers (SML) and subsurface layers (SS) in the Baltic Sea. Samples for spectroscopic measurements were collected during five research cruises in April/May and October 2013 and 2014 in a surface microlayer and a subsurface layer at a depth of 1 m along two transects from the river outlets to the open sea. The first transect was located from the Vistula River outlet to the Gdansk Deep and the second transect was located ´ from the Łeba River outlet to Słupsk Furrow. Results indicated that DOM fluorescence intensity in the SML is higher by 20% compared to the SS. The Humification Index, HIX values were lower in SML than SS by 13%. That indicates that SML is depleted in molecules with high molecular weight and higher aromaticy. The inverse relationship of fluorescence intensity of dominant peaks with salinity both in SML and SS suggests that FDOM variability is regulated mostly by terrestrial DOM input

Ask the GRU: Multi-Task Learning for Deep Text Recommendations

In a variety of application domains the content to be recommended to users is associated with text. This includes research papers, movies with associated plot summaries, news articles, blog posts, etc. Recommendation approaches based on latent factor models can be extended naturally to leverage text by employing an explicit mapping from text to factors. This enables recommendations for new, unseen content, and may generalize better, since the factors for all items are produced by a compactly-parametrized model. Previous work has used topic models or averages of word embeddings for this mapping. In this paper we present a method leveraging deep recurrent neural networks to encode the text sequence into a latent vector, specifically gated recurrent units (GRUs) trained end-to-end on the collaborative filtering task. For the task of scientific paper recommendation, this yields models with significantly higher accuracy. In cold-start scenarios, we beat the previous state-of-the-art, all of which ignore word order. Performance is further improved by multi-task learning, where the text encoder network is trained for a combination of content recommendation and item metadata prediction. This regularizes the collaborative filtering model, ameliorating the problem of sparsity of the observed rating matrix.Comment: 8 page

Rural-Urban Differences in Poverty: An Analysis of Pennsylvania Counties

This study examines the determinants of poverty in rural and urban Pennsylvania counties. Economic and demographic characteristics are evaluated in their relation to the poverty rate using panel data from 2000 to 2019 for the 67 Pennsylvania counties. A two-way fixed effects model is estimated to account for unobserved county-specific and time-specific heterogeneity. The results indicate that there are rural-urban differences in the impacts of explanatory variables. In rural Pennsylvania counties, economic factors have significant effects on the poverty rate. The percentage of employment in manufacturing and construction are negatively related to the poverty rate, while the percentage of renters and employment in agriculture are positively related. In contrast, only the percentage of female-headed households has a positive, statistically significant impact in urban counties. Oaxaca (1973) decomposition indicates that structural characteristics in rural counties help mitigate their poverty rates. The results suggest that different policies must be implemented in urban and rural counties to alleviate poverty

Combined nitrogen and drought stress leads to overlapping and unique proteomic responses in potato

Main conclusion: Nitrogen deficient and drought-tolerant or sensitive potatoes differ in proteomic responses under combined (NWD) and individual stresses. The sensitive genotype ‘Kiebitz’ exhibits a higher abundance of proteases under NWD. Abstract: Abiotic stresses such as N deficiency and drought affect the yield of Solanum tuberosum L. tremendously. Therefore, it is of importance to improve potato genotypes in terms of stress tolerance. In this study, we identified differentially abundant proteins (DAPs) in four starch potato genotypes under N deficiency (ND), drought stress (WD), or combined stress (NWD) in two rain-out shelter experiments. The gel-free LC–MS analysis generated a set of 1177 identified and quantified proteins. The incidence of common DAPs in tolerant and sensitive genotypes under NWD indicates general responses to this stress combination. Most of these proteins were part of the amino acid metabolism (13.9%). Three isoforms of S-adenosyl methionine synthase (SAMS) were found to be lower abundant in all genotypes. As SAMS were found upon application of single stresses as well, these proteins appear to be part of the general stress response in potato. Interestingly, the sensitive genotype ‘Kiebitz’ showed a higher abundance of three proteases (subtilase, carboxypeptidase, subtilase family protein) and a lower abundance of a protease inhibitor (stigma expressed protein) under NWD stress compared to control plants. The comparably tolerant genotype ‘Tomba’, however, displayed lower abundances of proteases. This indicates a better coping strategy for the tolerant genotype and a quicker reaction to WD when previously stressed with ND

Central Crosstalk for Somatic Tinnitus: Abnormal Vergence Eye Movements

Frequent oulomotricity problems with orthoptic testing were reported in patients with tinnitus. This study examines with objective recordings vergence eye movements in patients with somatic tinnitus patients with ability to modify their subjective tinnitus percept by various movements, such as jaw, neck, eye movements or skin pressure.Vergence eye movements were recorded with the Eyelink II video system in 15 (23–63 years) control adults and 19 (36–62 years) subjects with somatic tinnitus.1) Accuracy of divergence but not of convergence was lower in subjects with somatic tinnitus than in control subjects. 2) Vergence duration was longer and peak velocity was lower in subjects with somatic tinnitus than in control subjects. 3) The number of embedded saccades and the amplitude of saccades coinciding with the peak velocity of vergence were higher for tinnitus subjects. Yet, saccades did not increase peak velocity of vergence for tinnitus subjects, but they did so for controls. 4) In contrast, there was no significant difference of vergence latency between these two groups.The results suggest dysfunction of vergence areas involving cortical-brainstem-cerebellar circuits. We hypothesize that central auditory dysfunction related to tinnitus percept could trigger mild cerebellar-brainstem dysfunction or that tinnitus and vergence dysfunction could both be manifestations of mild cortical-brainstem-cerebellar syndrome reflecting abnormal cross-modality interactions between vergence eye movements and auditory signals